HUNGOVER

“Hey, Jules. You okay? You’re quiet this morning,” Eric asks, concern heavy in his furrowed brow.

A smile tugs on my lips at his nickname for me, loving how close we’ve become.

“Yeah…I’m just tired.” That’s a lie. The truth is, I’m dreading the approaching summer. Talking to Eric is my favorite part of every day, I’m not ready to give that up. A lot can change over eight weeks, things might not be the same between us next year. What if I lose this—lose him—for good?

“Come on,” he smirks, nudging my shoulder. “You should be in a good mood. It’s the last day of school! Aren’t you excited?”

I shrug. “Actually, my summers are usually pretty boring. How about you?”

My pulse races as I wait for his reply, wondering if he caught the subtlety behind my question. I don’t have the courage to outright ask him if he’d like to hang out over the summer.

“My summer will be pretty busy.”

Nodding, I turn to look out the window of the bus, worried the disappointment will be evident on my face.

“Hey, before I forget,” Eric chirps, bringing my attention back to him as he digs through his backpack and pulls out his yearbook. “I wanted you to sign my yearbook, and I was hoping I could sign yours.”

It’s not like asking to sign my yearbook is a declaration of his love for me, but my heart still stutters all the same.

“Yes, of course,” I rasp, pulling out mine. “I’d really like that.”

Panic sinks in the moment we’ve made our exchange, my mind going blank as I try to think of the perfect words to write. It’s only made worse when I glance over at Eric out the corner of my eye and he’s already writing in mine.

I tap the pen to my lip, my nerves becoming more shot by the moment. I can’t hand this back to him without writing something. Taking a deep breath, I do my best to let the words flow.

Closing my eyes, I fold his book. When I open them again, Eric is staring at me with a soft smile on his lips. My stomach does that flipping thing it always does when he looks at me this way—like I’m someone precious to him.

My hands shake as I hand him his yearbook and take mine back, my eyes widening when he immediately flips it open to read what I’ve wrote.

“Wait! You’re going to read it right now?”

“Yep! Go ahead. You know you want to read mine too.”

He’s right. I’m dying to see what he wrote. So, when he drops his head to read my words, I open mine to do the same.

December 20th

The ringing of my cellphone wakes me, and my head pounds to the beat of my heart. When I open my heavy eyes, the room spins, and I quickly close them again. It’s been a while since I’ve been this hungover. I almost forgot how awful it can feel.

My mouth is dry, my body is weak, and I need to pee like a racehorse. Yep, I drank way too much last night.

My mind is still hazy and it takes me a moment to remember where I am. When the cold, hard reality hits me, my heart sinks.

With a sigh, I reach over to grab my cell phone off the nightstand, knowing without looking who’s on the other line.

“Hi, Lori,” I rasp.

“Why am I hearing from Cat that my baby sister is home?” she demands, hurt and anger both evident in her tone.

Tennessee was once my home, but it became a place of heartbreak and nightmares for me long ago. I don’t know if I can handle being back here. If the thought of allowing Christopher to ever touch me again didn’t make my skin crawl, my fear and weakness would send me right back into his arms. This place holds too many memories for me, some I wish I could permanently get rid of.

Rubbing my aching temples with my free hand, I adjust myself to a more upright position and glare at the sunlit window, as if that will make the sun retreat in fear and set again. It doesn’t. “I was planning to call you this morning, but Lizzy and I had a late night,” I offer, knowing my explanation won’t do anything to help.

If last night is a preview of what life here will be like for me, I’ll never survive it.

My chest tightens as I think of Eric and the harsh, coldness in his eyes as he looked at me. We were close once…or I thought we were. I loved him. I still love him. Seeing him last night proved that.

He doesn’t deserve my love, nor my friendship at this point, and I shouldn’t have any desire to go down that path with him again, but I do. The agony of missing him has been unbearable. It’s been awful always wondering and never knowing how he was—if he was safe and happy.

What I want or how I feel doesn’t matter anyway. He clearly doesn’t care about me. Perhaps he never did.

For years, I held on to the hope that Eric still thought of me despite everything. I wanted to believe he was out there missing me as much as I missed him, but I finally gave up on that notion.

“What the hell is going on, Julia?”

My chest burns as bile rises in my throat. I wouldn’t be ready to have this conversation even if I weren’t hungover, but it isn’t doing anything to help the situation. I sigh. There’s no way around it. Christmas is only a few days away, and then I’ll get the pleasure of explaining to my entire family that my husband is a cheating bastard.

“I left Christopher,” I announce, bracing myself for her reaction.

When I’m done explaining what happened, I pretend to listen as she goes on a twenty-minute rant about Christopher, not even taking a break long enough to notice when I put the phone down to go the bathroom. It’s exactly why I didn’t tell her when everything went down—why I never talked to her about my marriage at all. What I need right now is support and understanding, not ‘I told you so’s’.

By the time I get her off the phone, I’m even more exhausted than before, longing for the distance that used to be between my family and me. Though I told Lori I needed a couple days to adjust to everything, that I’d see her on Christmas, something tells me she’s going to ignore my request.

As I snuggle back into Lizzy’s guest bed determined to get a few more hours of sleep, my mind wanders back to Eric. It took me years to get over the pain of losing him, to stop thinking about him daily, but it only took seeing him once to undo it.

Pulling up the Facebook app on my phone, I search for Eric—something I haven’t done in a long time. It’s pathetic. His life is none of my business, but there are questions I want answered. Is he happy? Does he have any kids? What has his life become? My quest for more information falls flat, and it really shouldn’t surprise me that there’s no profile for him. He always did prefer to stay off the grid. Turning into a total stalker, I decide to look up his brother. He does have a profile, but it’s set to private. The only thing I can see is the profile picture of him with some redhead on his arm. I scowl at the photo, praying he hadn’t been at the bar last night flirting with me while his girlfriend sat at home.

Shaking my head, I close out the app and toss my phone down on the bed. This can’t happen. I can’t let myself get sucked back in by Eric. Seven years ago, he made it clear I was disposable to him and reiterated that fact last night. I have enough on my plate to worry about without adding him into the mix. He’s part of my past, and I need to focus on my future.